Engadget's latest edition of Keeping it Real Fake (KIRF) dug up this gem from the bowels of Chinese low-cost smartphone market Huaqiangbei in Shenzhen, that does a fairly good job at imitating an HTC One, a smartphone that makes a Galaxy S4 look like a cheap slab of plastic. Imitation is the best form of flattery, and the same holds true with fake smartphones. Given that a company has gone through so much trouble in perfecting a fake, you can imagine how popular the real article can be.

The fake HTC One looks, and to an extant, feels exactly like the original. It takes a little while to subjectively tell if it's a fake, but the forger left a few telltale signs. The material has a different texture to it, it's not aluminum, but ABS with faux-chrome at the edges, some logos are different, and most of all, the software isn't running Sense UI. You could overlook that for a "Google Play Edition" (stock Android), but the real differences kick in with the performance (they always do).

The fake HTC One is driven by an el cheapo MediaTek MT6589 quad-core Cortex-A7 SoC that isn't even in the same league as the original's Snapdragon 600, once you fire up the benchmarks. The 4.7-inch IPS LCD screen looks crisp, but really features just 1280 x 720 pixels resolution compared to the original's 1920 x 1080, which makes for some of the highest pixel densities in the industry. The original is twice as fast as this fake at Vellamo, and nearly four times as fast, at 3DMark.

Other specs of the fake HTC One include an 8-megapixel primary camera which fools the software into believing it can shoot at 13 megapixels, Android 4.2.1 "Jelly Bean," 2 GB of RAM, a 1,600 mAh battery, 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 2.1 EDR. As for the price, it's going factory-unlocked at the equivalent of US $210.